The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

Effie had once thought Ben was haughty, but she could see the strain on him now; his every sinew was taut as he carefully attempted to talk Lizzie down: “I think we know what this means.”

Lizzie shook her head minutely. Her eyes had not left Ben’s face since he’d started talking. They lingered there still, reading him like a map, and as he formed his next words, they filled once more with tears.

“I don’t think you have a choice. We need to go inside,” Ben said gravely. “And then we need to explain to everybody what has been going on.”

Lizzie’s expression was one of frightened pleading. Make this not be real, please. She was still strapped into the car, as though the release button on her seatbelt was the timer on a bomb.

No reply to our messages, no ringing even, and now…here? Is accountant Dan on the lam?

Effie’s lips perked inappropriately in a half-smile just at the thought: the prospect of mild-mannered Dan in the ill-fitting guise of hot-blooded lover. The notion was so out of character it was comic: quiet old meat-and-two-veg Dan slipping his London life in pursuit of love thrown off, determined to unjilt himself by sheer force of will. What would he do, rend his corduroy blazer and beat his pale, hairless chest? It would be like watching City men in expensive suits attempt an orderly fistfight at closing time.

Effie flicked her eyes to meet Anna’s and saw that her face was drawn, her skin ashen, the tip of one white tooth visibly biting her bloodless bottom lip.

“Come on, Lizbet,” she murmured, shifting on her feet to gaze back at the spot on the horizon at the end of the track, as though they might suddenly see him—Dan—framed at the bottom of the cypress avenue.

Effie remembered the wedding figurines with their heads sawn off, the lucid, floating letters in the guest book. Words scrawled into the steam on the mirror, the torn page of the notebook as another message had been stabbingly etched onto the paper there. Surely they were safe, like Bertie had said?

“Do you really think we have anything to worry about?” she started to say to Ben, doubtfully. “It’s just D—”

But he spoke across her like a blanket smothering flames: “There’s a lot you don’t know about Dan, Effie.”

He stood and stretched out a hand to Lizzie. Mute, the former bride finally unfastened her seatbelt, tipped herself like a ragdoll into Ben’s open arms, and let him half-lead, half-drag her into the cool of the château.

Behind them—Bertie’s gentle face full of concern, Charlie’s a mask of confusion, Iso puzzled and curious—the others fell in and followed, just like a wedding procession.

34. Anna

Inside, Ben led Lizzie through the Hall and back out to one of the sunbeds around the pool, where the rest of the group gathered.

If Slim Aarons did sob stories. Anna tutted herself for the sarcasm; she had never seen Lizzie like this.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about Dan,” Ben repeated, after he’d helped the former bride—as creased and pale as her white dress—to a lounger. There was something almost triumphant in his demeanor as he played hero of the hour; Anna realized he was reveling in it slightly.

“He’s…a great guy,” he continued, and Lizzie bit her lip. “I’ve known him since boarding school, and he’s always been a really loyal friend. Someone you knew would always look out for you, always stand up for you. It’s a kind of code-of-honor thing with him, you know?”

At this, Lizzie snarled a half-laugh.

“Let me tell them, Lizzie,” Ben said quietly. He turned to face the others. “But recently he’s become, well, more than protective of Lizzie. More like her keeper, really.” He paused and wiped a hand over his face. “Look, I didn’t know any of this until Lizzie told me—last week, when she canceled the wedding.”

A ripple moved through the people assembled as the wind sent a flurry across the surface of the pool: the reveal.

“She called me last week,” he said. “Dan had taken her purse with all her cards—she had no money, couldn’t leave the flat. So she asked me over, and told me what had been going on. I couldn’t…when I got there, I couldn’t believe how scared she was.”

Anna watched as her friend’s eyes rolled back in her pale face and she let Ben do the talking: Lizzie was the last woman Anna had expected to let a man narrate her life like this for her.

“It started with comments about her staying out too late, drinking too much,” Ben said. “Hanging out with her friends when she could have been with Dan, him worrying when she didn’t tell him what time she’d be home.”

Anna knew immediately how welcome those comments, that clucking, must have at first seemed to Lizzie, more used to Guy’s remote apathy and laissez-faire style of boyfriending. She watched helplessly, with a stomachful of foreboding, as her friend’s head sank forward to her knees, bent in front of her on the sunbed.

Ben continued: “That was when she began to find Dan a bit intense.”

“It was intense—we’d just moved in together,” Lizzie broke in with a weak moan, barely lifting her head up. “You go out way less, you stay in together….Everyone does! It was nice!”

“That’s right.” Ben’s voice was kindly, but he seemed irked by Lizzie’s lingering instinct to excuse her former fiancé. “But then he wanted to know where she was all the time, so he could ‘keep her safe,’ he told her. And then Dan started putting you down, didn’t he? Saying you were stupid, weak, confused. He told Lizzie she was pathetic—that she’d done well to snare him, that her life was empty beyond him. Even though it was his campaign that had shut down her social life.”

Anna thought of those sad six months between the engagement party and the week planned for the wedding when she had known—instinctively, like language—that